After watching her mother’s plans for a home in Nigeria unravel, the SabiTrack founder set out to make projects easier to follow from wherever their owners live.

Motunrayo Hambolu knew how hard her mother worked in the United States. She knew what it took to keep the lights on there while sending money to build a home in Nigeria. When another request came from the project, her mother sent more, even when the exchange rate was unfavourable.

Then she came to see the house.

According to Motunrayo, it stood in a waterlogged area. The American-style home included a basement that flooded during the rainy season. Her mother had furnished it, but the property was far from what she had expected. Eventually, she wanted to sell. At the time of our interview, Motunrayo said the family was still looking for a buyer.

“There has to be a better way of doing this,” she recalled thinking.

For Motunrayo, now the founder and CEO of SabiTrack, the experience raised a question she could not leave alone: how could someone funding a project know what was happening before they arrived to see the result?

SabiTrack is her attempt to give that person a clearer view. It brings project plans, progress updates, approvals and payments into one place, with tools for both individuals and organisations. Behind the software is a founder who has spent much of her life being the person others turn to when something needs organising.

The friend who always had a plan

Motunrayo is the eldest of six children. Growing up meant figuring things out, taking responsibility and making sure things happened. That instinct followed her through school and into adult life.

Her friends called her “aunty fun times”. She liked a good outing, but she also wanted to know how everyone was getting there and what needed to happen first. Birthdays, weddings and trips became occasions to put her planning instincts to work.

Her career gave that habit more structure. She worked as a business analyst, learning to gather requirements, understand existing processes and identify where they could improve. At Visa, she progressed from programme coordinator to senior technical programme manager, working with portfolios, budgets and teams.

One lesson stayed with her: capable people do not automatically make a project run smoothly. Someone gets sick. Someone leaves. A senior executive changes direction after work has begun. The person managing the programme has to explain what that change will cost, what it will delay and what can reasonably wait.

“A lot of times people forget the human factor involved in doing these projects,” she said.

As she considered building a business of her own, friends encouraged her to look at what she already enjoyed. Advice she heard at church reinforced the same idea. The skill she was searching for was already part of her daily life. Her mother’s experience gave it a problem to address.

In 2025, she decided to build a company around it. An early conversation with the friend who is now her CTO concerned a tool for timestamped, location-based proof of work. The idea grew into a wider platform for managing the work itself.

What exactly has been agreed

To explain SabiTrack, Motunrayo uses a home renovation. Imagine you live abroad and want to renovate your mother’s house in Nigeria. You fund the work, so the platform treats you as the sponsor. A sibling or an interior designer can join as a collaborator to coordinate it locally. The people doing the work join as vendors.

The renovation is divided into milestones. Removing old paint might be one stage; applying new paint might be another. Each stage has an agreed price and a description of what completion should look like. Vendors can submit photographs, videos or written updates at intervals agreed with the collaborator, while the sponsor follows progress.

That level of detail matters because “finished” can mean different things to different people. A venue may have been booked, for example, but does it hold the required number of guests? Is it within budget? Does it have the dance floor the client asked for? Motunrayo says SabiTrack’s AI features can help users turn their plans into milestones and criteria for accepting the work. A knowledgeable collaborator can also help define those expectations.

When plans change, the original agreement remains part of the record. A revised budget or deadline can be documented and approved, rather than disappearing into a long exchange of messages.

This is where she sees a practical difference from managing everything through WhatsApp and spreadsheets. A person may remember the first price discussed while someone else is working from a later message. Finding both messages does not necessarily settle whether everyone accepted the change. SabiTrack is designed to keep the agreement and its revisions together.

The person doing the work needs certainty too

Motunrayo is careful to include vendors in the trust problem. A client worries about paying for work that never happens. A vendor may worry about completing work and then chasing payment.

She describes a funding process in which the agreed amount is placed in a wallet before work begins, with funds held through third-party providers rather than by SabiTrack itself. Payment is tied to the project’s completion and approval process. Where a vendor needs a deposit for materials, its purpose can be recorded and discussed upfront.

There is also an optional role she calls a project runner: someone independent of the vendor and collaborator who can visit the site and submit their own evidence. For a straightforward painting job, that might mean checking that the right house has actually been painted. More specialised work may call for someone with the relevant expertise.

The point is to give the sponsor another view of what is happening on the ground. Motunrayo does not describe software as a substitute for every human check. She recommends regular updates and, where appropriate, a runner who can verify the work in person.

The company is still developing its marketplace of vendors, collaborators and runners. Motunrayo also described tools for detecting misleading or AI-generated evidence as work in progress. For now, the process she emphasises starts with clear expectations, frequent updates and people checking what has been delivered.

Two products competing for a founder’s attention

SabiTrack began with individuals. Motunrayo says its business offering followed in April 2026, with the first enterprise client arriving in May and another in June. That interest began to pull her attention towards organisations.

She compares the experience to having a second child and discovering that the first still needs you. Companies were asking for the product, but people funding personal projects were also getting in touch. Their needs reminded her why she had started.

She has since brought in a salesperson to help develop the business offering while she spends more time reaching individuals, particularly people in the diaspora. She wants them to understand that the platform can be useful before a project becomes large or expensive.

A family trip is one example. Buying tickets, booking accommodation and planning activities can become milestones, with family members collaborating. Motunrayo says planning without payments between a sponsor and vendor is available free. Users can also work through a mobile browser if they prefer not to download an app.

For organisations, SabiTrack offers subscriptions. For personal projects involving payments, Motunrayo describes a fee based on a percentage of the project’s cost. She also says the company is beginning to explore customised builds, including for government clients, with optional maintenance.

One example she discussed was Smartcomply’s use of SabiTrack for The Secure Horizon event in Nairobi. With vendors in Nigeria and Kenya, she said, the team could bring updates into a shared dashboard instead of following separate WhatsApp conversations. Project managers could see progress, and vendors could submit updates and receive payments through the platform.

Asked for adoption and delivery figures, Motunrayo did not provide verified totals during the interview. She described feedback from organisations that found it easier to follow teams, identify projects at risk and see whose approval was holding up work. Those accounts offer an early view of how customers are using SabiTrack, rather than a measured claim about how much it improves delivery.

Learning to wait without standing still

Building the company has tested a skill Motunrayo already needed in programme management: patience. Selling a product she believes in means hearing objections, waiting for decisions and accepting that other people may not see its value immediately.

“It’s not everything you need to respond to,” she said.

She is learning to hold on to the purpose of the business while staying willing to change how it gets there. The shift between individual and enterprise customers is already part of that experience.

Her immediate focus is Lagos and Nigeria, even as she looks towards other African markets. She recognises that expansion involves more than making the software accessible: payment options, local requirements and language support all need attention.

When asked what would make her proud, she returned to the people using the product. She wants more people to feel able to do business in Nigeria because they can follow what is happening to their projects. She also wants skilled vendors to have a place to show past work and reach customers who might otherwise never find them.

Her mother’s house remains a painful part of that ambition. A platform cannot undo what happened there. What Motunrayo hopes to change is the experience of the next person sending money home: being able to ask a question, see the work and make a decision while there is still time to act.

Explore SabiTrack at www.sabitrack.com and on Seed